Posted on 07/07/2011 7:52:05 AM PDT by newzjunkey
Ever seen communication between people under 30? Looks like code, and I have noticed it between themselves in the professional ranks. I once even had to counsel subordinate on the use of "teh" and "b4" in emails. Very sad, the dumbing down of our society.
I never stopped, although years ago I developed my own form of shorthand, it is still almost entirely in cursive.
That’s got nothing to do with the lack of using cursive. That’s got to do with the use of spell checkers and texting. As life gets more convenient and self correcting certain skills evaporate. Most of the population can’t drive a stick either.
Agreed, but how about the rest of historical text, including family history. Within two generations, it will look like heiroglyphics to them.
I don’t know where cursive is taught any more. Spelling will be the next to fall....
^^^^
In many schools, they are not being taught basic math. They give them calculators without ever teaching them their multiplication tables. I have taught high school students who had no idea of how to do long division.
Handwriting has not been taught in WA State schools for years. Key boarding is emphasized in grade school instead. Printing is taught so that the kids can learn to read. Handwriting is just an after thought.
We printed everything and I continue to print everything today.
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I have a brother who is left-handed, as were all four of my brothers. He never uses cursive. It seems so strange to see a letter from him that is completely in block letters.
My handwriting has evolved over the years to a combination of cursive and block. I think everyone develops his own style over time.
The heck it doesn't. It is just one of those "evaporative skills" that you cite. I call it the dumbing down of our society. Don't get me wrong, it didn't just start at the electronic age. Read letters and papers from your ancestors. The style was much more flowing, and intelligent. Needless to say the actual vocabulary of those who were literate then, had to be twice as much as people today.
Face it our language has gone ghetto.
When in the real world will they use cursive?
***
Thank-you notes? Letters of sympathy for a death? Love letters?
I'm not a believer in Esperanto, to put in mildly, I'm more of "the world should speak english" kind of guy, lol.
I agree cursive is slower to read and comprehend, especially today when it isn’t used as much. But how can cursive writing be slower than print writing when the writer is competent in both? You don’t have to pick your writing instrument up and set it down for every letter, only between words and punctuation in cursive. Unless I am missing something, which is very possible.
Everyone knowing some sort of standardized shorthand would be much more worthwhile than everyone knowing cursive.
Freegards
THAT was the deciding factor for me ... I had to learn to take morse code at (I think it was 45wpm .. but I honestly forget)
It was radio school I learned for the first time crossing sevens and zees (european style) and boxing the letter U so it doesn't get mixed up with the V.
To this day, if and when I have to spell something to a telephone jerk, they ALWAYS repeat with an entirely different phonetic.
My Sirius XM is MU7Y72WV and when I called about a problem I identified; Mama Uniform 7 Yankee 7 2 Whiskey Victor, which was repeated back to me, Michael Umbrella 7 Yes 7 2 Wonder Victor.
I congratulated the person on the other end for getting one of them correct.
Hey, I never said I was a pro, lol.
That said, I honestly think it would be best for kids to learn to type, as early as possible, and using that method, would help them develop better typing skills, and fewer typos, with more speed. The QWERTY method, was never an efficient method to begin with (it was designed to sell typewriters, not make better typists), and should have been phased out years ago, only due to laziness is it still the dominant system.
I still write a considerable amount by hand, and I’ve always found cursive to be faster than printing. After a stern talking to I got from my third grade teacher about my terrible handwriting, I cleaned up my act and have maintained good penmanship ever since. Up until recently, plenty of writing was done in cursive and, since I like to do historical research, and read old census records or Grandma’s old post cards, etc., I need to read cursive, and knowing how to write it makes reading it easier. I find an aesthetic pleasure in writing and reading cursive that I don’t find in writing on or reading off a computer screen, in the same way that I prefer a real book to a Kindle. I’ll agree that none of this is hard-core practical, but a lot of what we get in education isn’t hard-core practical. I used to hear my classmates complain about having to study grammar, mathematics and history, or about having to read literature: how am I ever going to use this? What they were missing was not only the content of what was being taught, that could help them be truly educated and cultured people, but also the discipline that comes from learning anything. I’m glad my son’s school taught him cursive — I was going to teach him myself if they hadn’t — that he has the skill and the discipline that came from learning it, and that he can find some enjoyment in it as I have. His keyboaring skills haven’t suffered anything from his having learned cursive — he is fast and accurate and got an A in his keyboarding class.
Evaporating skills are not society getting dumb, they’re society moving on. People don’t have to write cursive anymore, so they don’t, even if they’re taught it they don’t. There’s other skills we’ve had to learn in the new modern world. Most of my ancestors couldn’t install an operating system, I can. Their language is more wordy, not necessarily more intelligent or a better flow, I’ll especially challenge the flow claim. There was a lot more beating language to death then, stringing together a bunch of words when half that is necessary. Our language isn’t ghetto, it’s to the point. We no longer use an entire paragraph to say somebody ran away in fear.
> “I still write letters by hand, with a fountain pen. The e-mails I sent my sons while they were away at college are already gone, but they still have my letters.”
It’s true that letters — written out laboriously and thought worthy of a stamp :-) — tended to be preserved more than emails are nowadays. Technically it would easy to preserve emails too, but they often consist of just a few chatty lines, and may not be thought worth preserving (or the better ones are mixed in with many like that, and get lost with the rest).
A decade or so ago I edited a collection of family letters going back to the 1800s and covering several generations. My relatives weren’t famous persons, and their names wouldn’t be recognized by anyone here, but reading their letters was much like reading an epic novel — joy and sorrow, births and deaths, war and peace — the trivial, the petty, and the near sublime, a little bit of everything that goes into life.
Transcribing the original letters was quite a job. Some passages I never could completely decipher. It was interesting seeing the different kinds of handwriting, of course, but that interest lasted just a few minutes. What interested me most was what they had to say. Printing that in books and putting it on cds made it accessible to others in the family, and insured that it would be preserved for generations to come.
[Fire and flood can easily destroy old family letters. I urge others to make copies of anything they’d like to keep, and make sure some are stored in other places.]
Actually technically QWERTY was designed to make better typists, you just have to keep in mind what made a typist “better” back then. One of the big problems they were facing with the early hammer style typewriters was strikers getting tangles because one striker wasn’t down far enough when a fast typist was hitting the next letter. The solution they came up with was putting the most common letters under the weakest fingers, thus slowing the typist down, thus delaying the next strike, thus keeping the strikers from tangling, thus actually improving their overall speed.
It’s lack of being phased out isn’t a matter of laziness, it’s a matter of having better things to do with our time than relearn typing. We have multiple generations that know QWERTY by touch, there’s really no way to phase it out, you either replace it or you keep it, if you replace it then all the old typists need to relearn from scratch, so we keep it.
That's true to a point. The point being when all writers of cursive have finally died out and only the historians can read cursive writing. The general populace would not be able to read the Declaration of Independence and other historical docs. It would be as big of an enigma as the Babylonian writings in clay tablets................
It's kinda hard to type with your knuckles all red and swollen from being smashed by an oak ruler..................
someday when they’re stuck on a desert island with a bottle and a pencil they’re gonna wish they had taken the handwriting course
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